Poshdeluxe

hello, it’s 2008!

hello, 2008.

hello, everyone living in 2008!

henri, matt and i are in san angelo, the last (random) stop on our NYE road trip. we’re heading back to austin today.

i’m a little sad, cos i don’t want this trip to end. and yet, i’m excited to get to know 2008 and discover all of its secret, exciting plans. i bet it has plans for all of us, don’t you think?

and so, before i start writing about all of the whimsicalities and wonders of this trip, i’d like to post a poem by marc mckee. i think jessica sent it to me after the beginning of 2007, and i’ve been storing it this whole year, waiting to lay it out there, gently tossing it into the wind. i hope it will trigger hopes and possibilities for you and for me and for this brand new, squealing, red-faced baby year.

here’s to the new year, and to us. to really us.

New Year’s Resolutions
after Jason Koo

To describe someone as a burning viola.
As they are making an important point.
In the middle of a completely different conversation.
To wear a lightbulb somehow.
To kneel.
Drinks coordinated with economic realities.
For once.
Quiet as a rhinoceros or an exquisitely poised lamp.
To rust the sky with licked lips.
Music.
Unexpectedly.
To own the elevator.
To create the feeling that once we all leave this elevator we will be leaving the single
most incredible elevator ride that we have ever had or will have ever had.
Quiet until the electricity circles once too often feet-beneath.
To drive the right nail truly.
Here’s a house!
Effortless echolocation.
To deliver an address the gist of which is felt as one walks off a particularly crisp
morning on a New Zealand shore.
Which is to say, several thousands of miles thither.
To continue failing to be eaten by sharks as in the dreams of my friends.
To make conjuration work for me.
& for you.
To balance an unwieldy tonnage.
& drink more juice.
I mean water.
We will never be lost again.
How does that guy from Okkervil River do it?
I mean with the words, genius. And harmonies!
A helicopter bouquet.
An helicopter bouquet?
To write a letter to Vic Chesnutt that strikes a fine balance between appreciation and
irreverence.
Or, reverence and “familiarity.”
Post-Op:Tics: The Motion Picture.
I mean movie.
To [infinitive].
To finish The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.
To start again.
At the press disconference, I will announce a deuce of late Franks as my lyre gods.
Drinks, right?
To call my friends more often.
To learn to sing harmony.
To not inflict it on anyone who isn’t already asking for it.
All of a sudden I look like a million bucks.
A million bucks papier-machéd over Michelangelo’s David.
Clothed.
Except when—you get the idea.
To not announce my candidacy.
This cheap Pinot tastes like candy. Candy.
Less candy proper, more wine that at first is like candy but then after a few drawn-out
gasps turns into the sad glory of the last seconds before the mountain swallows the sun
slipping from the grasp of an audience of contorted mists.
To send you a postcard.
To never be post-postcard.
To discourage at first humorously the misspelling of my name.
Later with a platinum mace.
To not—sigh—have cigarette.
It would be nice to go into Atlanta and see a number of friends and make new ones.
But—.
To lunch unambitiously.
To lunch as though the empire could be disimperialized and this achieved through a
particular methodology of lunching.
To listen again, and once at least per annum, to the basement show recorded by my friend
Jeremy circa July 2000.
Remember Weezer’s first album? It was pretty great.
Remember OutKast’s first album? More amazing than 75% of modernism.
To be able to blink the eyes Beth Orton wears on her Best Bit EP.
Not really.
To run two miles.
Straight.
Again.
To make the impossible snowshoe and mail it to a former colleague.
Imagine the decrease in productivity if fun was even this fun all the time.
To graffitti—respectfully—the dorsal fin of an orca.
To doff my headgear.
To haff headgear para dolphin.
To make less fun of the L=A=la-la-la’s.
I don’t know: isn’t that ['] suspect?
To care less, Re: that.
To love you more, more than a whittled 18 wheeler, more than a hummingbird learning
English, more than a boat, more than a blender blending, more than the next chapter, more than fictive heroics, more than taffy, more than metaphysical resoluteness, more than &tc.
To love you.
To concoct the appropriate elegy for my sadly-now-defunct redder Honda Civic.
To keep said elegy under 300 pages.
You were right when you said it’s a hard rain gonna fall.
To live in spirit the scene in Roxanne when Steve Martin is forced to make 20 jokes
about his nose that best the insult “Big nose,” and does. With an audience. Remember? In a movie otherwise forgetable but for its scene of tennis racket martial arts?
To remind everyone about the character of Bill in the upsettingly unappreciated show
Freaks & Geeks.
Raspberry jam is the best jam. With seeds.
To call my sister every week.
To do my best as a helping part of the ineluctable chaos party that is the world, so they
can be happy.
By “they” I mean my they but I also mean your they.
To make the birds that would be able to safely and with elegant quickness vacate burning
birdhouses.
I’m
the sa-aaame
as I was
when I was
6 years
o-o-oold.
Not really.
To not be so dubious.
To be entirely dubious, only differently dubious.
I am so lucky to get to lick I mean this living. I mean to live this life.
I mean to live this life.
To you.
This year, empathy is the swollen forest of gold chains warming Mr. T’s neck.
To love the awedience.
To be loved by the oddience.
To zoo.
To concoct a postcard for Mary Ruefle, the most underrated poet in the United States,
9 years running.
Exceptionalism in Aestheticali: okay.
O Aristophanes!
“When the jury finds you guilty, you’re Sugarland bound.”
Like I said: to you,
To you:
It.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes, they’re American planes
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night,
shall stay these couriers
from the swift completion
of their appointed rounds.
To us. To really us.
And now a toast.